Category: Art of the Month Club

I am a huge fan of pop art. In my studies at Marlboro College I focused my energy on anarchy and graffiti. As I looked at the history of the graffiti movement I found so many similarities with the work of Andy Warhol.

When I first moved to the area about seven years ago, I made my way to the museum. One of the first pieces to thrill me that I saw was a terra cotta sculpture of a dog that was in one of the glass cases. Not just a generic clay dog, but also a very special Colima Mexican dog!

Before the curtain goes up on WTF’s productions, audience members are handed a program. Somewhere between the Artistic Director’s welcome letter and the listing of Donors, there are 8 pages specific to the show that give audience members both basic information and a greater context for the production.

It has been 11 years since Louise Bourgeois’s Eyes, were installed as a gateway into the Williams College Museum of Art. Its undulating magic carpet of verdant lawn and burnished bronze bobbing eyeballs with extended phallic pupils has served as a touchstone for discourse, both negative and positive, a playground, a landmark, and a memory.

I am one of a handful of people who has seen, handled, photographed, studied, and marveled over every ancient object in the museum’s collection as part of WCMA’s ongoing digital imaging project. That’s more than 2,000 objects, and among them the beads are the smallest.

One of the most striking objects at WCMA is the enormous bas-relief of the King of Nimrud from the Iron Age of Man, approximately 900 B.C.E. To be in its presence is, for me, an extraordinary experience of being transported in space and time.